He shut the door behind me and walked into the trailer’s kitchen, gesturing for me to follow. The refrigerator door rattled when he pulled it open. “Beer?” he asked, and I nodded, picturing him growing up here in this ramshackle trailer with his abusive father. What he must have endured. Popping the tops off two Shiner bottles, he said, “So, you’re home for the summer. Boyfriend visiting this year?”
His expression was almost neutral, but I knew him too well, and he hadn’t exactly curbed his opinion of Mitchell when I’d asked for it last summer. He also hadn’t been far off base.
Boyce and I hadn’t talked or texted during the four years I was away at school unless I was home for a weekend or during semester breaks. His actions—or lack of them, I suppose—had confused and hurt me at first, when I’d text him and get a word or two in response. Or nothing at all. I was lonely and homesick, and for some reason, he was home to me in a way that no one else was. Maybe because he’d remained here when Melody and most of my other friends dispersed to colleges all over the country.
We hadn’t spoken since winter break, when I told him I’d been accepted into the doctoral program in marine biology. When he’d sized up my cowardice in one glance and guessed that I wasn’t going to do it. When he’d said the thing about being afraid to live my life, delivered in the candid method I knew to expect from Boyce—no sugarcoating, no sidestepping politeness. I hadn’t wanted that to be true, so hearing him say it kind of pissed me off.
Truth spoken out loud like that has a way of niggling at you from the inside, nudging your heart, tugging at your soul, lighting your mind with possibilities and sinking your gut with the risks behind them. Truth knows how to say I dare you and make you take notice, even if you’d rather disown it and remain insulated and safe.
That conversation had occurred before the ugly breakup with Mitchell.
“No. We, uh, broke up. A few months ago.”
He blinked, still trying to pull his mask of indifference into place. Boyce was thoroughly capable of disconnecting emotionally. For years I’d watched him go cold with authority figures and peers and other girls, like he was insensitive to other people’s rants or disappointments. No matter how scared or angry or dejected a normal person would have been, unless he was in the mood to punch somebody, he’d just shrug it off. I knew that ability must have been acquired in ways I probably wouldn’t be able to handle the details of. He was never completely detached with me, though. Not when we were standing this close. He was a confusing mosaic of moods when it came to me, but never detached.
“Oh?” he said, his eyes glinting with something more than simple curiosity.
Sighing, I shrugged and took the beer. “Yeah. He wasn’t too keen on my decision not to go to Vanderbilt with him.”
The bottle in his hand paused halfway to his mouth. “You’re going somewhere else, then?”
I nodded. “I’m going into the doctoral program here. The one I told you about before?”
“Marine biology, instead of med school.”
Five months had passed since I’d told him that, but he’d remembered. Immediately. “Yeah.”
“So you’re staying here. Not just for the summer.”
“The first two long semesters are on the main campus, and there will be some travel to different dive sites over the following few years to build my general knowledge base and then gradually work toward my dissertation focus. But the program is based here, so a year from now, I’ll be here full time.”
“Cool.” He took a swallow and cleared his throat, staring at his haphazardly tied work boots. “That’s really cool.”
I stared at his hands—big, strong, dusted with light hairs, a few scars, and more recent scrapes likely due to his work. He’d grown out of fistfights. I had no idea where he stood on dating or relationships—whether there was a current girlfriend or a regular hookup or a series of them. He’d grown out of being talkative about that too. I wondered if he’d grown out of his desire for me. It had appeared when I’d given up on it and became a kind of game—he flirted and sweet-talked and stared, one brow cocked, shameless. I demurred, silently, as if both of us knew it would never happen, all the time wanting more. Ridiculously more.
By my second week of high school, I’d been absorbed into a new social circle—one I suspected had allowed me entrance based wholly on my new lifestyle and appearance. Not that I particularly cared. The worries about my few former friends—most of whom didn’t even recognize me when we passed in the hall or when I sat down a row over in class—faded. I was no longer Pearl Torres, daughter of a Mexican immigrant single mother. I was Pearl Frank, stepdaughter of an established town surgeon. I didn’t forget who I was, but it seemed like no one else—my mother included, sometimes—remembered.
From the opposite end of the hallway, I’d seen Landon first. He’d grown a bit taller and a bit more self-confident, no longer staring at the floor as he had in middle school. The boy next to him was taller and bigger, his short red hair contrasting sharply with Landon’s dark in-need-of-a-haircut mane. Boyce looked like one of the seniors instead of a sophomore. Where Landon was quietly confident, Boyce was assertively so—his laugh deep and loud, his smile wide, his eyes, connecting with mine, sharp.
I was stunned by how quickly and surely he recognized me. We’d never had an actual conversation, had only spoken in passing, and not even that in over a year, since I was still in middle school. I’d seen him in town—at the grocery store, on the beach, driving past me and Mama in his loud black car. I knew he smoked. He had a tattoo on his arm (a Marine emblem—I googled it), which was illegal since he was still under eighteen (also googled).
Melody, staring down the hallway, said, “Ohh, there’s Landon… And ugh, Boyce is with him. Great, he’s looking right at me. Fuck.”
She was wrong. Boyce was looking at me. As we drew closer, his gaze didn’t waver. He said something to Landon, who glanced my way but whose eyes instantly shifted to Melody.
“Just ignore Boyce Wynn,” she’d said as the four of us drew closer, the students around us just blurs of color. “He’s a dickhead. I seriously can’t stand him. God, I have no idea why Landon and he are tight now. They had a vicious fight last year—remind me to tell you about it later. Boyce jumped him in the hallway. He’s also complete trash—his father is an alcoholic who runs a garage and they live in a trailer—total stereotype, right?”
Melody clearly didn’t understand the term stereotype. Nor did she know a thing about Boyce Wynn.
As we reached them, her face morphed into a honeyed smile. “Hi, Landon.”
“Hey, Melody,” he said.
I waited for Boyce to inadvertently remind Melody of our humiliating elementary school connection, but he acted as though she didn’t exist.
“Hey, Pearl,” he said, staring at me like I was a double chocolate cupcake.
“Hi, Boyce.” I felt the blush rise from my chest to my neck to my cheeks, and I turned my face away to conceal it. Nine years. Nine years, I’d waited for him to notice me that way, and now he had… when I was finally pretty.
chapter
Seven
Boyce
There was something about Pearl that had belonged to me since the moment I dragged her out of the ocean and onto the sand, but I hadn’t understood the full scope of those feelings until I spotted her at the other end of the hallway at school—first day of September, tenth grade. My entire life flipped, narrowed, and focused when she came into view, and everyone else disappeared.
She was a mirage—all curvy little body and coils of dark hair pulled away from her face to uncover her big dark eyes and full lips. I’d been like one of those morons who couldn’t see the value of a classic super car unless it’d been overhauled and restored. A true car buff knows the worth of a wreck sitting in a junkyard, rusting and waiting for its parts to be stripped. Pearl hadn’t changed; I’d merely been blind and now I wasn’t. Clothes, hairstyle, makeup—these were minor modifications, none of which wo
uld matter if she was lying under me in my bed.
A rush of heat and blood and want hardened my dick as though it meant to part the crowd between us and claim her right then and there. “Down, boy,” I muttered.
“Huh?” Maxfield said, and I just shook my head, thankful for the mass of people and the strategically held notebook in my hands. He followed my gaze to Pearl and was immediately distracted by Rover Dover—thank God, because if he’d looked at Pearl that way, I probably would have shredded the fuck out of our friendship right there, without a second thought.
I’d been an idiot. A total fucking idiot.
• • • • • • • • • •
She was staring at my hands—the one loosely gripping the neck of a Shiner bottle, the other hooked in the front pocket of the only jeans I owned that weren’t marked with engine grease. Jesus, what I’d give to know what she was thinking. Was she lost in thought and staring aimlessly, or wondering if I remembered the feel of my palms and fingers skimming over her smooth, golden-brown skin?
My fingers curled against the denim near my groin, and her eyes skittered to the kitchen table, and then to the box in that damned chair—the label of which was clear as day: HUMAN REMAINS.
“Is that… your father?” she asked, pointing.
Goddamn. Even dead, he was fucking up my life.
I glanced over at the box as though I had to check to be sure what she was talking about. “Yep. I expected to get more satisfaction out of having him incinerated, even if that’s what he wanted. I suspect he knew he would be a pain in my ass a little longer that way. If I’da buried him, it would be done and done. Instead, I’ve got to figure out what to do with a creepy-ass dad-in-the-box.”
She choked a laugh, eyes dancing. “God, Boyce.” For some reason, she’d always found me funny. In high school, I would catch her smirking at some idiotic remark I’d made, trying to hide it while her best friend bitched and fumed and called me all sorts of names as though I gave a fat crap. Both of their reactions just egged me on, of course.
“I keep thinking he’s gonna pop up outta there like one of those damn windup clowns.”
She shook her head, smiling. “Maybe you could scatter him from the pier?”
I frowned. “Not gonna happen. I told him I wouldn’t be totin’ his dusty ass to the water or performing some pointless farewell ceremony. He’s gone, and I’m glad.”
She angled her head, sobering. “I know you are, and I don’t blame you one bit. But maybe dumping his ashes in the gulf would bring you some closure.”
“Ain’t no closure for me and him, Pearl.”
“I understand,” she said, and I hoped she didn’t.
“Besides,” I added, sliding back into the comfort of disrespectful humor, “I’m pretty sure he’d amount to pure-D marine pollution.”
She chewed her lip. “What about our sandbar? We could dig a hole, dump him in, and put a big, flat rock on top of him.”
Our sandbar. The one not quite the length of a football field from her backyard—if a football field was submerged under eight or nine feet of water. A couple of marshy, sea-grass-covered islands and a dozen or so sandbars—an extension of the nature preserve that ranged as wide as the town—stood between the wide-open bay and her neighborhood.
When I was in tenth grade, a guy offered to trade me a shitty aluminum boat with a sporadically working outboard motor after I found a working vintage Holley carburetor for his ’69 Boss 429 at a scrapyard in Corpus. I took the deal because that ugly-ass boat could maneuver the pass from the backside of town around to the channel between that bunch of tidal marshlands and sandbars—across from which the Frank house occupied a corner lot on a dead-end street.
I don’t know what I thought I was going to do from there—spy on her? Then I heard Dover talking her into having a party there the coming weekend when her parents would be out, and I knew trading a scavenged Mustang part for that leaky relic had been a stroke of luck. Or genius.
“I don’t know, Mel… if anyone reports it—”
“As long as we don’t invite too many people and don’t build a big fire, no one will see. It’ll be so cool. It’s my birthday. C’mon, Pearl—pleeeeease? Clark can get his dad’s boat that night and we’ll ferry everyone there and back.”
She blinked her lashes at Pearl like she always did at my best friend—who was a sucker for every damn cocktease move she made. If he’d just wanted a hookup, I wouldn’t have cared—anything that screwed over Clark Richards was good, including his girlfriend getting some on the side from my boy. But he was all in, and she knew it. She twisted him into knots every time he saw her and then left him that way to bounce back to that rich asshole.
Pearl sighed and agreed to the party. The last thing Maxfield needed was to witness Dover and her dickhole boyfriend making out, so when he slid onto his stool at our lab table a couple of minutes later, I didn’t tell him about it.
Come Friday night, I motored down the channel near Pearl’s place, alone, beaching the boat as soon as I saw the glowing fire pit and heard the music. There were about a dozen of them—all rich kids, no townie losers—drinking and dancing around the low flames. I pulled the boat up behind a clump of marsh grass and watched, feeling like some kind of lurker sociopath. Pearl was dancing with a guy who couldn’t keep his hands off her—a junior named Adam Yates. His parents were both dentists; when we were in second grade, they’d come to school to talk about teeth and pass out toothbrushes and business cards.
My jaw steeled, but I had no rights where she was concerned. She wasn’t mine. She’d never be mine. I wanted to leave, but for some reason I just sat right there like a masochistic jackass.
When the birthday girl passed out cold just before one a.m. from too many shots, Clark trundled her and several others into his boat, leaving behind the dick who’d been feeling Pearl up all night. Richards and Yates didn’t bother to disguise the thumbs-up signal between them, but no one was sober enough to witness it but me. The rest of the partiers left with PK Miller when he said he had to make curfew with his dad’s boat or his mom would chew his ass the rest of the weekend.
Pearl stumbled around, dousing the fire with sand and chucking cups and bottles into a trash bag, because of course she was preventing fire and picking up trash, even hammered. Yates trailed along behind her, trying to take the bag or get her to stop. I was too far away to hear them. My fists tightened when he slid his arms around her and kissed her neck, but I did no more than stand up from the rock I’d been parked on for two hours because she seemed willing enough. Until he turned her around and did something she didn’t like—too much tongue?—goddammit—and she gagged and shoved at his chest.
I abandoned my grass-hidden rock and ran. Before I reached her, he howled and went to the ground like a sack of hammers, and she yelped and staggered back.
When she saw me, she started and gasped. “Dammit, Boyce—you scared me to death! What are you—”
“Are you okay?” I demanded, grabbing her shoulders and turning her to me. I checked her face in the moonlight. Other than the fact that her eyes were so unnaturally wide that the white parts showed all the way around the brown and she was trembling, she looked all right.
She nodded, no idea how she’d scared the shit outta me. Yates hadn’t moved a muscle, and her voice went soft. “Is he… is he breathing?”
I knelt, feeling for a pulse and refrained from saying I hope not, because then she’d probably insist that one of us do mouth-to-mouth, and neither fucking option for that was acceptable.
“His head hit my knee on the way down,” she said.
Fingers at his throat (ignoring the urge to wrap my hands around it and squeeze), I found his pulse and struggled not to laugh. “I take it another part of him hit your knee just before that?” I stood. “He’s fine, by the way. Or at least he’s breathing.”
She breathed a relieved sigh. “Boyce, why—and how—are you here?”
Confession is good for the soul, they sa
y, but it’s not so great for scoring points in a semi-stalking sort of situation. I couldn’t stare into her eyes and lie, though.
“I heard y’all talking about the party in bio.”
She frowned, more sober than I’d thought she was. “Then you must have heard it was a private party to celebrate Melody’s birthday. You weren’t invited.”
Ouch.
She took two steps away from me before going straight back down in the sand on her ass, gasping and holding her knee. “Dang that hurts. Adam’s head must be hard as a rock.”
I knelt next to her, fingers inspecting her bare kneecap, all too aware of her soft skin and short shorts and how she smelled like a handful of flowers. “You’ve got a pretty good lump going here.”
Her fingers slid between mine, testing the rapidly swelling spot. “Great. I should get some ice on it…” She frowned at Yates, who’d begun to snore, and then to the water’s edge. “Clark just left me here? How the hell was I supposed to get home?”
“Surprise, Pearl, Richards is an asswipe. He took off with Dover and a few other people. Probably giving Yates time to make his move.”
She glared—luckily at Yates. “Make his move?” Her gaze shifted back to me. “So how are you here?”
I shrugged. “I have a boat.”
Studying the shoreline for the second time, she asked, “Is it an invisible boat?”
“Ha-ha.” I pointed, chuckling. “It’s down the beach a ways.” I stood, swinging her up into my arms. “C’mon, bruiser, let’s get you home.”
Between the low drone of the bayside waves and the sensations crashing over me—her soft hair grazing my arm and my cheek, the feel of her body pressed against mine, the perfect weight of her—I almost didn’t hear her question.
“Do you remember… when I died?”
I almost tripped on nothing. I crushed her tighter, unable to look at her. I could feel her eyes on me. “Yeah.” The word escaped me, jagged, rough, and that day rushed back like a nightmare.
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